audacious and original devices. But time
wore on. Pompey's famous floating battery would not float, his moving
monster battery would not move. With the one; the subtle Italian had
intended to close up the Gullet to the States' fleets. It was to rest on
the bottom at low water at the harbour's mouth, to rise majestically with
the flood, and to be ever ready with a formidable broadside of fifty
pounders against all comers. But the wild waves and tempests of the North
Sea soon swept the ponderous toy into space, before it had fired a gun.
The gigantic chariot, on which a moveable fort was constructed, was still
more portentous upon paper than the battery. It was directed against that
republican work, defending the Gullet, which was called in derision the
Spanish Half-moon. It was to be drawn by forty horses, and armed with no
man knew how many great guns, with a mast a hundred and fifty feet high
in the centre of the fort, up and down which played pulleys raising and
lowering a drawbridge long enough to span the Gullet.

It was further provided with anchors, which were to be tossed over the
parapet of the doomed redoubt, while the assailants, thus grappled to the
enemy's work, were to dash over the bridge after having silenced the
opposing fire by means of their own peripatetic battery.

Unfortunately for the fame of Pompey, one of his many wheels was crushed
on the first attempt to drag the chariot to the scene of anticipated
triumph, the whole structure remained embedded in the sand, very much
askew; nor did all the mules and horses that could be harnessed to it
ever succeed in removing it an inch out of a position, which was anything
but triumphant.

It seemed probable enough therefore that, so far as depended on the
operations from the eastern side, the siege of Ostend, which had now
lasted two years and three months, might be protracted for two years and
three months longer. Indeed, Spinola at once perceived that if the
archduke was ever to be put in possession of the place for which he had
professed himself ready to wait eighteen years, it would be well to leave
Bucquoy and Targone to build dykes and chariots and bury them on the east
at their leisure, while more energy was brought to bear upon the line of
fortifications of the west than had hitherto been employed. There had
been shooting enough, bloodshed enough, suffering enough, but it was
amazing to see the slight progress made. The occupation of what were
call